On Wednesday, May 30th, PIASA will present an exceptional sale of photographs, showcasing great names of the 6th art such as Robert Mapplethorpe, Louise Lawler, or Andres Serrano. Also available will be two mixed media works by Peter Beard, blurring the boundary between plastic arts and photography in the artist’s unique style.
Peter Beard (born 1938), like his photography work, is a paragon of immoderation - his friend, neighbor, model and colleague Andy Warhol said of him that he was ‘one of the most fascinating men in the world …… he’s like a modern Tarzan.” Born to a distinguished family of industrialists, his path quickly strays away from the beaten track his Yale education guaranteed him. Attracted very early on to the sun-seared wilderness of Africa, he first discovers the paradise Hemingway and Karen Blixen’s novels had him imagining, before bearing witness to the hellish misery the local fauna lives. He photographs the demise of 35.000 elephants, a series that will be the basis of his major publication, “The End of the Game”, in which he testifies to the suffering borne by the large African mammals. His lifelong goal will be to protect them, defending animal population control through hunting in order to avoid starvation and illness within the ever smaller wildlife sanctuaries. His works and collages echo his engagement, depicting pachyderm carcasses photographed from the skies, scribbled on with hieroglyphic writing and decorated with blood - the blood of wounded animals, his own, or even Ava Gardner’s in one instance - revealing the brutality lurking behind the ‘Last Word From Paradise’ that is East Africa. His snapshots are published along with Romain Gary’s ‘Letter to elephants’, linked to his novel ‘The Roots of Heaven’ whose elephant-obsessed protagonist, Morel, is quite similar to Beard.
"Hence, dear elephant and Sir, that we find ourselves, you and I, on the same boat, driven to oblivion by the same powerful wind of absolute rationalism. In a truly materialist and realist society, poets, writers, artists, dreamers and elephants are only obstacles. "
Beard never abandoned his love for African Fauna, despite his many woes as a tracker and a hunter. In 1996, a furious Elephant tramples him, shattering his pelvis and ribs, spearing his thigh with its tusk. A few months later, a collage of his pictures along with the morphine tubes that saved his life are shown in public.
Younger still, he hunts down a poacher on his Kenyan estate and finds an ensnared rare antelope, and decides to throw the poacher in the antelope’s place in the snare. For this act, he’ll narrowly escape eighteen months in prison and a caning.
Peter Beard’s life can be read like a Who’s-who of the century - spent in between African wilderness and Western high society, his existence will lead him to build deep friendships with flamboyant artists, writers, and personalities. He covers a Rolling Stones tour with Truman Capote, spends his vacations on Aristotle Onassis’ boat with Jackie O., designs collages with Andy Warhol; Salvador Dali becomes fond of him, convinced that Peter is his deceased brother. His pictures show the casualness of his relationship with his models - the first work put to auction by PIASA, “Cousin Jerome Hill and Brigitte Bardot at La Batterie, Cassis” represents Bardot very naturally, on vacation; she will be one of his many muses.
Lot 70 - Peter Beard (né en 1938)
Cousin Jérôme Hill et Brigitte Bardot à la Batterie, Cassis, 1959-2008
One of the photographer’s most remarkable influences was Francis Bacon, whom he met in London. Fascinated by “The End of the Game”, he let Beard photograph his unfinished paintings, the polaroïds procuring him a fresh eye on his work.
Bacon painted several portraits of Peter Beard between 1975 and 1978; one of them shows Beard with a shaved head, fresh out of a Nairobi prison; others are triptychs or individual portraits. Amongst these, a study for a portrait, reproduced alongside the picture of a moran Masai in lot 71 of the sale.
Lot 71 - Peter Beard (né en 1938)
Portrait de Peter Beard par Francis Bacon
This work admirably evokes Beard’s life, between a passion for art and artists such as Bacon, and a passion for the African continent; the existence of a larger than life figure, whose stories are worthy of Kessel, Hemingway or Gary’s novels.
